Papias, the actual work ot .St. Matthew. He also obsen'os that even Schraiedel allows that il St. Matthew was not the author of the Lorjia, he may at all events have been the author of a writing, more ancient still, upon which the Logia depended (F.iiciic. Bibt. art. 'Gospels,' ii. 1891). See also Stanton, Tht (lospeU as Historical Documents, pp. 17, 18, for the (act that the Gospel which bears the name of St Matthew is the most often quoted of the Synoptics in early days ; and it is difficult, as even Jiilicher allows, to account for the attribution of a Gospel to an .\postle so little known as St. Matthew.
and power of the position already won, and with the response made by the human soul to the
Snfection of Christ presented to us in the Gospels. ut whatever may have been the case with Kitschl himself, it can scarcely be said that liis method has prevented those who claim in some measure to be his followers from dealing very loosely >vith the Gospel miracles, or with such events as the Virgin-birth and the Resurrection of the Lord. And it is difficult to see how this process of solution can fail to weaken the impres- sion made by the 'historical' Christ, and our con- fidence in the revelation which we owe to His life.
Many of tliose who are classed as Ritschlians dismiss in a somewhat arbitrary fashion sayings and deeds of our Lord which seem to them to admit of difficidty. The manner, e.g., in which J. Weisa has dealt with the oldest Gospel, that of St. Mark, in his Das alteste Evangelium, cannot be said to inspire a conviction of the truthfulness of many of the most familiar Gospel narratives. Henmann's own statements help us to see how sub- jective his method may become. He maintains, e.g., that through the impression which Christ makes upon us and our experimental knowledge of His power to confer freedom and deliverance, all uncertainty as to whether the figure of Jesus, which works thus upon us, belongs to legend or to history is in the nature of the case impossible.*
But it seems a curious argument to maintain that the impression which Jesus makes upon us is the positive revelation made by God in Christ, while the Gospels from which we derive that impression may or may not consist in this in- stance or in that of legendary and untrustworthy matter. Herrmann himself says that, in face of the seriousness of a desire for a salvation which means forgiveness of sins and life in spiritual freedom, the miracles in the NT necessarily be- come of minor importance ... he who has found Jesus Himself to be the ground of his salvation has no need of those miracles (op. cit. p. 180). But if Jesus is ' found ' through the portrait of His life presented to us in the NT, it is not too much to say that that life is inextricably bound up, from its beginning to its close, with the miraculous, and that the impression which that life has made upon the world has been made by a record from whicli the miraculous cannot be eliminated. Con- viction of sin, e.g., must precede deliverance from it ; and St. Peter's cry, ' Depart from me ; for I am a sinful man, O Lord ' (Lk 5'), resulted not only from Christ's teaching, but also from the proof of His miraculous power.
7. It is in this attitude towards the miraculous, and in this eflbrt to lessen its scope, that we mav find a point of contact between what we may call the 'scientific' and the Ritschlian school. In a large and growing number of German critics who might be described as ' scientific,' if not as radical, there is an acceptance of the miracles of healing as due to the power of the personality of Jesus and to the response of faith which lie evoked. We may see this in more or less degree in the statements of O. Holtzmann (Leben Jesii, pp. 58, 149, 166), or in those of Furrer {Das Leben Jesii Chfisti, pp. 129, 130), or in Bousset ( Was icissen u-ir von Jesus ?, p. 56). So, too, statements of a similar kind meet us again and again in the ac- count of the miracles of Jesus given us in the series of popular little books on the religious- historical aspects of Christianity, which is now in course of publication in German}' (cf. Die Wunder im NT, pp. 32 ff., 51 tf, by Traub).t -Ajid in our
•See, e.g.. Communion u-ith God, p. 177, and cf. p. 81ff. Eng. tr., for other 8tat«ments made above.
t See on the value ot these little books the Hibbert Journal, January 1906.
CRITICISM
CRITICISM
own country we remember how decisively Dr. P. Gardner would discriminate between mere wonders of healing and ' miracles proper,' and how he describes Jesus as a healer of disease as his- toric*
But at the same time it is evident how much there is which is arbitrary in this modem treat- ment of the miraculous. Thus Lepiu justly criti- cises Schmiedel's attitude in this connexion.t Schmiedel distinctly affirms that it would be wrong in any investigation of the miracle-narra- tives of tlie Gospels to .start from any sueli liostulate or axiom as that miracles are impossible (Encyc. Bibl. art. ' Gospels,' col. 1876). But a few pages later in the same article (col. 1885) he writes that it is quite permissible for us to regard as historical only those cures of the class which even at the present day physicians are able to effect by psychical methods — as, more especially, cures of mental maladies (cf. also Harnack, Das Wesen des Christentums, p. 18). The same occasional power is ascribed to Jesus by Professor N. Schmidt, The Prophet of Nazareth, p. 264.